I Remember... I Might Have Been Five

I remember the smell of my lunch box, the plastic ones with a companion thermos. The smell of sandwich in its ziploc bag and the futility of searching for morsels on the long bus ride. It was a long bus and I sat in the back with my too small coat. I would run up the gravel drive when the bus pulled up to my rural address in upstate New York.

I remember the birch trees in our rather large yard. How I liked pulling the silvery bark apart! It made me think of zebras. I also loved how its leaves looked like twirling coins during autumn. I remember, in the third person, myself running while wearing a brown coat, or maybe it was blue and grey? and pulling along a rainbow hued kite as my father looked on. His hair was jet black at the time and he didn't have his belly. He looked like I do now, skin draped on bone by virtue of genetics. I remember a white window, and tunneling in the snow. My mother dug a cave in which I huddled.I think I fell out of my bunk bed that night. My mother remembers me smearing petroleum jelly on the old faux wood vinyl wall paneling of our trailer home.

I remember thinking how wonderful it would be to gather the clouds into a jar and hold it forever, captured within the glass, as I soared across the continental United States, leaving the only home I remembered. Now I don't remember so much; my memory is a box of old photographs, of moments arrested in Time.

Story summary

Tell us about things you remember from your past, that you sort of miss, or don't. If you're still young, it could be that you miss the games and friends of early childhood, or could be something from your past that you remember fondly, or with distaste. If you've had a long life, like I have, a lot of things have changed since your childhood. Tell us about it.

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Tell us about things you remember from your past, that you sort of miss - or don't. If you're still young, it could be that you miss the games and friends of early childhood, or it could be something from your past that you remember fondly, or with distaste. If you've had a long life, like I have, a lot of things have changed since your...

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